Is Your UI Accessible?

​We’ve got web accessibility top of mind right now, which is especially critical for our clients with constituent-facing forms or member portals. Our team recently ​participated in a series of training sessions led by Mark Root-Wiley on evaluating web accessibility. Mark’s curriculum centers the needs of people with disabilities, to help organizations provide more equitable access to information and services.

"There's no magic button or checklist for making websites accessible,” Mark says. “It takes time, knowledge, and—most importantly—a commitment to working in a way that considers the needs of every visitor, regardless of what technology they use and how they use it."

Although there’s no magic button, there are some very helpful online scanners, checklists, and testing tools that can guide you toward improving your organization’s digital assets (websites, member portals, email templates, apps, etc.). Every issue you resolve clears an obstacle for some of your users and often improves the UI experience forall of your users.

We are incorporating more accessibility evaluation tools into our implementation and Salesforce support work, and recommend that you try out some of the tools yourself if you aren’t regularly checking your web assets for accessibility. The checklist from The A11Y Project is great, and we really like Accessibility Insights for Web, axe DevTools, and sa11y. But best of all, incorporate testers with accessibility issues to make sure your content and tools are available and accessible to as many of your constituents as possible.

Finally, if you’re interested in working with Mark, reach out. He’s a great trainer!